The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to higher education systems everywhere. But while some changes, like moving lectures online, were relatively easy to make, assessment posed a much bigger challenge. Assessment can take many forms, from essays to exams to experiments and more. They increased their use of programs like Turnitin to check for matched wording in students' assignments. And for closed-book, timed tests they used tools such as Proctorio, which monitor a student's computer or phone while they write exams.

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering key developments in AI research, industry, geopolitics and startups during January 2023. This one is a monster so it might get clipped in your inbox (read the online version in case!). Nathan wrote an oped in The Times for why university spinouts are a critical engine for our technology industry and why spinout policy needs urgent reform. The Times Higher Education profiled our open source data term database, spinout.fyi. Nathan commented on The Financial Times' Big Read on The growing tensions around spinouts at British universities. The State of AI Report provided two key figures to The Economist's piece on The race of the AI labs heats up. Register for next year's RAAIS, a full-day event in London that explores research frontiers and real-world applications of AI-first technology at the world's best companies. As usual, we love hearing what you're up to and what's on your mind, just hit reply or forward to your friends:-) BioNTech acquired London and Tunis-based AI startup InstaDeep for $680M (cash stock) - this was a huge deal.

As the final year of college approached, my friends and I, all electronics engineering students at Sudan University of Science and Technology, found ourselves struggling to come up with ideas for our graduation project. One day, while sitting in what we called "Jabnah" a version of a local cafe here is a picture of what it looks like I suggested using deep learning for malaria detection. My friends were skeptical, as we knew nothing about either deep learning or malaria. But I was determined to learn and proposed that we take an online course on deep learning. The course was challenging, but I was determined to succeed.

Vumacam, an international technology company, is now building out more applications on Proof 360 for the South African market, including a system to detect license plate cloning – when two cars show up in different locations with identical plate numbers. It's also opening up the platform for third-party developers to add their own applications and distribute them to its users. Later this year, Ricky Croock Chief Executive Officer at Vumacam Johannesburg Metropolitan Area118, says that the company will switch to a new model, where customers will pay a flat fee to get access to the full network of cameras instead of just a selection. Agencies will still be able to filter the alerts to their jurisdiction, but they will also be able to view any feed in the country. The new approach will allow Vumacam to place poles and cameras irrespective of whether there are paying customers nearby.

This report from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) covers the most salient progress in research and reporting over the second half of 2021 in the field of AI ethics. Particular emphasis is placed on an "Analysis of the AI Ecosystem", "Privacy", "Bias", "Social Media and Problematic Information", "AI Design and Governance", "Laws and Regulations", "Trends", and other areas covered in the "Outside the Boxes" section. The two AI spotlights feature application pieces on "Constructing and Deconstructing Gender with AI-Generated Art" as well as "Will an Artificial Intellichef be Cooking Your Next Meal at a Michelin Star Restaurant?". Given MAIEI's mission to democratize AI, submissions from external collaborators have featured, such as pieces on the "Challenges of AI Development in Vietnam: Funding, Talent and Ethics" and using "Representation and Imagination for Preventing AI Harms". The report is a comprehensive overview of what the key issues in the field of AI ethics were in 2021, what trends are emergent, what gaps exist, and a peek into what to expect from the field of AI ethics in 2022. It is a resource for researchers and practitioners alike in the field to set their research and development agendas to make contributions to the field of AI ethics.

This special issue interrogates the meaning and impacts of "tech ethics": the embedding of ethics into digital technology research, development, use, and governance. In response to concerns about the social harms associated with digital technologies, many individuals and institutions have articulated the need for a greater emphasis on ethics in digital technology. Yet as more groups embrace the concept of ethics, critical discourses have emerged questioning whose ethics are being centered, whether "ethics" is the appropriate frame for improving technology, and what it means to develop "ethical" technology in practice. This interdisciplinary issue takes up these questions, interrogating the relationships among ethics, technology, and society in action. This special issue engages with the normative and contested notions of ethics itself, how ethics has been integrated with technology across domains, and potential paths forward to support more just and egalitarian technology. Rather than starting from philosophical theories, the authors in this issue orient their articles around the real-world discourses and impacts of tech ethics--i.e., tech ethics in action.

How do we deal with very large data sets of high resolution images, in particular in the field of radio astronomy? This question encompasses the scope of a joint PhD project between the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa), and ASTRON, which is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Modern radio telescopes typically consist of 100 to a few hundred receiving elements, whose signals are pairwise correlated producing tens of thousands correlations for tens of thousands of frequency channels simultaneously. For a system like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) this produces a data deluge of 1 TByte/s. This data may be affected by man-made radio frequency interference (RFI), instrumental failures and other effects that make the data unsuitable for scientific analysis.

This report from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute covers the most salient progress in research and reporting over the second quarter of 2021 in the field of AI ethics with a special emphasis on "Environment and AI", "Creativity and AI", and "Geopolitics and AI." The report also features an exclusive piece titled "Critical Race Quantum Computer" that applies ideas from quantum physics to explain the complexities of human characteristics and how they can and should shape our interactions with each other. The report also features special contributions on the subject of pedagogy in AI ethics, sociology and AI ethics, and organizational challenges to implementing AI ethics in practice. Given MAIEI's mission to highlight scholars from around the world working on AI ethics issues, the report also features two spotlights sharing the work of scholars operating in Singapore and Mexico helping to shape policy measures as they relate to the responsible use of technology. The report also has an extensive section covering the gamut of issues when it comes to the societal impacts of AI covering areas of bias, privacy, transparency, accountability, fairness, interpretability, disinformation, policymaking, law, regulations, and moral philosophy.

AI in medicine, particular in pediatric medicine holds much promise in taking scarce human expertise and making it available throughout rural America and to the rest of the world. Rwanda has one pediatric cardiologist in the country. In 2015, when neural network technology succeeded in building computer algorithms which were better than humans at image recognition signaled the beginning of this renaissance in AI. But, as the above chart courtesy of Jeff Dean, head of Google Brain shows, the only way to get increasing degrees of accuracy is to have more and more data. Any of you in major metro areas will see Waymo vans driving around collecting more and more data to feed autonomous driving software development.

There is mounting public concern over the influence that AI based systems has in our society. Coalitions in all sectors are acting worldwide to resist hamful applications of AI. From indigenous people addressing the lack of reliable data, to smart city stakeholders, to students protesting the academic relationships with sex trafficker and MIT donor Jeffery Epstein, the questionable ethics and values of those heavily investing in and profiting from AI are under global scrutiny. There are biased, wrongful, and disturbing assumptions embedded in AI algorithms that could get locked in without intervention. Our best human judgment is needed to contain AI's harmful impact. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of AI will be to make us ultimately understand how important human wisdom truly is in life on earth.